Sig.ma – a new browser for the Web of Data
One of the most used tools technology has provided us with is the concept of search engines. Business people, writers, teachers, students, and people from all facets use search engines. The most used and popular software is that of Google but one of the latest products emerged is that of Sig.ma.
This software is a tool to explore and leverage the Web of Data. At any time, information in Sigma is likely to come from multiple, unrelated Web sites – potentially any web site that embeds information in RDF, RDFa or Microformats .
Normally what search engines do is to provide any kind of information related to the data typed in which results in a lot of unwanted information being provided. The user then needs to clear the unnecessary material and select the data which is useful. In the case of sigma, it puts together a series of related inputs regarding that particular query and puts it to together as a single data sample and presents it. It currently uses mostly Yahoo! BOSS and Sindice. It primarily is used to put together that collection of data fragments (which they call a ’sigma’) into a permanent URL. This in turn can then sent around or embedded as an iframe in another web page.
One of the major disadvantages of software like this is the fact that more time is spent to remove unnecessary data that the user is not interested in. So when the user requests a specific piece of data he spends a lot of time cutting and editing the irrelevant material. And moreover, one would definitely not be interested in squandering his time clearing up another person’s messy material when he needs some information from a search engine. Sig.ma on the other hand, emerged for the sole purpose to enable people to actually obtain the information they were looking for than for just publishing papers about potential Utopian scenarios. So in that regard sig.ma was created with a lot of potential, and definitely will play an integral role in the technology of search engines by providing efficient semantic information mashup.
Tags: search engines, semantic information mashup, Sig.ma, Web of Data